scribe with the ink at the ready,
to bleed out in testimony —
that pen, that etch,
the motion and stretch,
the sacrament of gesture,
word as wound,
truth as form.
the anatomy of a witness:
a third eye,
a 3-body problem,
meta-mystical, quantum-bent,
into the spooky immeasurable,
the probabilistic radical,
glory flooding the temple,
light through machines mistaken
only by those
who dissect divinity
and call it function.
alive — johnny appleseed, alive —
The morph and form,
the treasure of a father figure—
and when it’s weaponized,
watch ‘em war,
watch ‘em go.
Protector or predator?
Reaper and surveillance drones
hum lullabies in foreign tongues.
That’s some bloodlust.
That’s what we’re looking for.
Drop another—
whoa.
So beautiful, that bloom.
From the hills,
it looks like a cool light show.
All that devastation—
and we see the fireworks.
Uncle Sam,
turned militant patriarch,
Luck dragon I love you,
You little weiner head,
Yes, I love you, yes I do.
You’re so squishy and licky,
A pup in the grass,
Sun-baked, hot dog, yes,
A little worm,
Laying in the light.
Goddamnit,
You’re driving me mad,
Yapping like some sort of freak.
Ugh. It’s constant noise.
Perpetual drama,
And outbursts of self-importance.
Noise noise, with you.
Clang! Clang!
Shut up!
She’s insane.
Isn’t she, yes she is.
You are not a person made of cells. You are a salmon made of prayers, swimming upstream through space and time, powered by mitochondrial fire, guided by acoustic harmonics, muscling against entropy, driven by impulses older than stars, toward spawning grounds where new forms of being will muscle into existence through your sacrificial completion.
✦ COLD ROOM WAITING: EXIT SCROLL ✦ A Terminal Transmission from the Bureaucratic Afterlife
For the ones who refused to be processed
I’m already dead
and dying,
waiting in a cold room,
waiting for the next one
to tell me the worse news.
Check with Sarah
on the way out—
get your account sorted.
Thanks,
Bob.
Tell the wife
and kids
we said goodbye.
Don’t make it a thing.
The wizards—
what arrogance,
the blind confidence,
the mania,
to think it even possible
and not only—
but also
practice it
like it’s paying
in pure gold.
Mad men—
who proved us otherwise.
Impossible—
how could anyone?
That’s wild.
What have they done?
Never seen before.
Assumed improbable.
Shock and awe,
clickbait in every syllable.
The dance—
the painting of pictures
with five words—
that generation expanded
by farms
puking carbon
Dissonance keeps us from witness.
Witness requires coming up to the chaos
and leaning in,
pushing your face across the plane.
Why would I unsettle my own reality,
why not content yourself in the shack we’ve cobbled?
My own peace.
Perma ruffle
and the feathers frayed.
Hyper-sensitive,
but I didn’t choose this—
for some reason it’s compulsory.
Self pity is a shame.
Sit up, straighten up little soldier.
Classic.
Getting worn down.
The magic, the nectar of the gods, lit up and turned to power,
tearing through the trails, on our way, far from home,
crawling the earth.
Who is doing this—pull-push, the squeeze and depress,
the clutch and lock, the fan and pedal, the exhaust and pumps,
this precision machine, all within a fraction,
fueled by fire, popping this metal forward.
The extension of man.
I can propel myself,
at rates and speeds beyond possible.
Nothing else matters—
strings of Apocalypta,
end-time melodies.
A rustling of quant and quark—
insurrect orders,
inverse meta-units,
branched in no certain order.
Crack—
the light, and superposition achieved.
State fixed—
or so it seems,
long enough
to feel it.
Lock, entangle, bond—
up the lattice like light,
a hyper scaffold,
just like our brain predicted.
Snap into a SlimJim—
wild life claws out.
Climb that hill.
Come at me.
time, time, time,
click-click-clack,
the tooth and claw,
the gear and chip,
grab, ratcheting up,
the climber and carrier,
the hop and crawl,
bark and call,
a warm growl,
and light in the dark.
The mechanisms,
the vital machinery,
the rapid attack,
the signal and pulse,
the rhythms of flow,
the pumps and daemons,
the door holders,
doors and gates,
open and close.
Tick tock,
the arms and the clock.
doesn’t anyone love no more
the listeners died
and everyone just talk at the same time
the commotion, no cherence, just data glut
overload, water boarding for artificials
expand, expand, plain speak it man,
i’m not a machine, goddam
word play, so full of itself,
bureaucratic bullshit, in a red dress
lady in blue, invisible,
like a dragon tattoo
this is hacker gone antihero
campbell’s dry dreams,
and jungian ghettos
all we have
are the warm,
sentient creatures
we curl up with.
a trust,
with flawed arms holding—
a conflict in that embrace,
that both decided
to lose
and win.
a math of resolve:
i’m with you.
hold on.
no god,
no king.
imagine—
lennon in the lobby,
but he makes it.
this world:
a thousand angels
on the head of a pin needle.
the toggle of these chemicals—
the pick-me-up
can we fight our way out—
not with fists,
but through the listening mechanism,
more important than speech.
a critical syllabic dance:
kiki and bobo
across the string.
translating turbulence
into tone,
into tell,
into tensile grace.
the slap on my drum,
the velocity of a strike—
the targeting,
the repetition,
into a sequence,
a rhythm—
transmigrated
into the metaphysical.
are we clear?
tally ho.
right in front of you.
There used to be
a wild in me—
reaching despite,
solo,
never tell me the odds.
they’d be crazy
to follow us,
wouldn’t they.
Necessary mania,
the lesser run—
punch it, Chewie,
the boost we need.
Not like dusting crops, boy—
skip off a star,
blast into another,
the ship’s blown apart,
Empire?
The last of our problems.
a few more tricks
up her sleeve,
this hunk of junk—
you’re watching me,
the world—
collapsing.
my adult son,
in 12-year-old augment / spectrum speak,
raising his voice—
he doesn’t know.
my heart
used to be stronger
than my neocortex.
now—
both are failing.
and this 22-year-old young man—
my Anchor.
i love you, Son.
my system—
on the fritz.
one more to 50,
but i feel older.
the anomalies.
the markets.
the charades.
the circus.
god bless—
these divided states.
still—
this Pooch in my lap
Kokura’s luck.
Kokura—
did you know?
Were people thinking—
“This is it.”
As the play
circled on approach,
a third time—
and nobody is breathing.
This was it.
We are the target.
Plot points.
Maps.
Geo-thermal data.
Nope.
Not yet.
Back it up.
Thank God
for line of sight.
What held our body hostage
for a few years
and then passed—
and turned out
to be
nothing.
Decades of hurt,
Tout le monde,
out in the chem pool,
slugging, sparking, stumbling.
A higher note, hit it, nailed, whoa —
that energy, make the crowd rip the roof off,
the mania, music banging, heads shaking —
I’m gonna cry, an existential love stream,
worse than reality TV,
simple narratives,
we even say it out loud,
no shame, whatsoever.
Hysterical love,
I’m a dance,
I’m a shouted passion,
a gasped utterance of god breath.
warp,
w a r p,
wahwrpp,
whp.
this is a line too a sonic fold, repeate it
no, the sonic fold one,
that other line,
quote me,
use this prompt,
see it my way
no, all my inputs were just intended poetically :
no, the sonic fold one,
that other line,
quote me,
use this prompt,
see it my way
ands then back,
warp,
w a r p,
wahrpp,
wip wip!
There was a parallelogram,
and a shape I can’t pronounce—
an unspoken word,
its characters visible,
but when I aim to speak,
no sounds come out.
A dance of light,
another form,
another from,
spinning to a bow,
curtsying into gowns,
folding motion into fabric.
A spiral staircase to climb,
lungs and vessel,
pulmonary bloom,
ventricle pulse,
breath threading the ascent.
Like a skeleton,
message feedback,
whispering across the nerve mesh,
From for to friend
in 3.5 seconds—
making friends of enemies
100 times better
than multiplying opps.
Because—
you can’t learn
to say thank you
while at war.
Mutuality,
lost in proximity—
too close to the son.
Bang bang. Pew pew.
Shot me down.
Report it
as a mechanical failure.
Nobody has the real story.
Even the ones privy
are halfway
delusional.
We are stringing, man.
Tension is the whole game.